Emmett Till

How many people in this room are not originally from the United States? By a round of applause. -[applause] Where are you from, bro? You right there. [man] Iraq. You’re from Iraq? Ewww! I’m just fucking around. How long you been here in the country? [man] Twenty-three years. Twenty-three years? Are you a citizen yet? You are? Congratulations, nigga. Congratulations. Well, welcome to this great land.

You know, I’m gonna give you a history lesson, ’cause I’m sure this wasn’t on your entry exam. But every naturalized American has heard something about what I’m about to tell you. Picture, it’s the early ’50s in the United States. This 14-year-old boy goes down… from Chicago to Mississippi to meet his extended family for the first time. He’d never been to Mississippi. And before he went, his mother said to him, very pointedly, she said, “If a white man looks you in your eyes in Mississippi, look away.” And I don’t know what you know about black people from Chicago, but they’re not a scared people. Legend has it, he was in front of a convenience store, hanging out with his cousins, having a good time, and a white woman walked out of the store, and he thought she was pretty, and he said… [whistles] “Bye, baby.” Not realizing that he'd just made a fatal mistake.

Four days later… Four days later, a group of adult white men burst into this family’s home and snatched a 14-year-old boy out of bed, in front of his family that was powerless to stop them, and he was never seen alive again. His name was Emmett Till. They found his body maybe a few days later. It was in a creek, tied to a wheel so it would sink, horribly beaten and bloated. Hideous. And lucky for everybody in America… his mother was a fucking gangster.

She was. If you can imagine, in the very midst of a mother’s worst nightmare, this woman had the foresight to think about everybody. She said, “Leave my son’s casket open.” She said, “The world needs to see what they did to my baby.” And every publication here in the United States, from Jet magazine all the way to the New York Times, had this boy’s horribly bloated body on its cover. And if our Civil Rights Movement was a car, this boy’s dead body was premium gas. This was a very definitive moment in American history, where every thinking and feeling person was like… “Yuck! We gotta do better than this.” And they fought beautifully, and here we all are.

And the reason that I bring that up tonight and why it’s relevant now, is because less than a year ago, the woman that he allegedly whistled at… admitted on her deathbed… that she lied in her court testimony. And you can imagine, when we read that shit, we was like, “Ooh! You lying-ass, bitch.” I was furious. That was my initial reaction. And initial reactions, we all learned as we get older, are often wrong or more often incomplete. They call this phenomenon “standing too close to an elephant.” The analogy being that if you stand too close to an elephant, you can’t see the elephant. All you see is its penis-like skin. You gotta step back and give it a better look. And on stepping back and thinking about it for a few moments, I realized that it must have been very difficult for this woman to tell a truth that heinous about herself at any point in her life. Even the very end. And I was grateful that she had the courage to tell it before she left this world. Because it’s an important truth and we needed to know.

And I said to myself, “Well, thank you for telling the truth… you lying-ass bitch.” [audience cheering] And then time goes on, and then after time, you can kind of see the whole elephant. And it’s humbling. ‘Cause you realize that this woman lied and that lie caused a murder. But that murder set in motion a sequence of events that made my wonderful life possible. That made this very night possible. How could this be that this lie could make the world a better place? It’s maddening.

And that’s how I feel about this president. I feel like this motherfucker might be the lie that saves us all. Because I have never felt more American than when we all hate on this motherfucker together. Jesus Christ. It’s good. And when it happens, I can see everybody that’s struggling. So if I’m on stage and I tell a joke that makes you want to beat up a transgender, then you’re probably a piece of shit and don’t come see me anymore. Or if you don’t understand that when a football player takes a knee during the national anthem, he’s actually standing up for me, then you might not want to fuck with me anymore. ‘Cause I swear no matter how bad it gets, you’re my countrymen, and I know for a fact that I’m determined to work shit out with y’all. And if that woman that said that heinous lie was alive today, I would thank her for lying..

And then I would kick her in the pussy.